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Product Description

It's Daisy Crispin's final trimester of high school, and she plans to make it count. Her long-awaited freedom is mere months away, and her big plans for college loom in the future. Everything is under control. Or is it? Her boyfriend is treating her like she's invisible, and her best friend is selling bad costume jewelry in the school quad--and hanging out with her boyfriend. To top it off, Daisy's major humiliation for the year will be remembered in the yearbook for all eternity. It's enough to make her wonder if maybe being invisible isn't so bad after all.

Publisher's Description

It's Daisy Crispin's final trimester of high school, and she plans to make it count. Her long-awaited freedom is mere months away, and her big plans for college loom in the future. Everything is under control. Or is it? Her boyfriend is treating her like she's invisible, and her best friend is selling bad costume jewelry in the school quad--and hanging out with her boyfriend. To top it off, Daisy's major humiliation for the year will be remembered in the yearbook for all eternity. It's enough to make her wonder if maybe being invisible isn't so bad after all. With more of the funny-but-too-true writing readers have come to expect from Kristin Billerbeck, Perfectly Invisible shows teen girls that everyone is special--no matter what they're going through.

Author Bio

Kristin Billerbeck is the bestselling, award-winning author of several novels, including What a Girl Wants and Perfectly Dateless. A Christy Award finalist and two-time winner of the American Christian Fiction Writers Book of the Year, Billerbeck has appeared on The Today Show and has been featured in the New York Times. She lives with her family in northern California.

Daisy Crispin is almost done with high school. Then she will finally be able to get away from her controlling parents and chase her college dreams. But the loss of her job throws a kink into her perfect plans. She'll never raise enough money for college without a job. And why is her sort-of boyfriend completely ignoring her? Does he like another girl? It had better not be her best friend, because that would be so wrong. As Daisy struggles to figure out how to achieve everything she's always wanted, she starts to wonder if all she ever wanted is all she thought it would be.

I'm so glad Kristin Billerbeck wrote a sequel to Perfectly Dateless! The characters in that book were wonderful, and now we get to spend more time with them. This book was fun, filled with one misunderstanding after another, lots of teenage angst, and lots of laughs. I loved how Daisy grew over the course of this book. These were two great books, and would make a wonderful gift for any teenage girl who loves to read.

This is a sequel to the book Perfectly Dateless. It continues Daisy's story as a girl from a very strict family (homemade clothes, no cell phones, no dates, no accepting rides from guys, etc) who desperately longs for normal to the point where she rebels to get it. By the start of this 2nd book in the series, Daisy has accepted many parts of her life and surrendered more to Christ, but she still has some serious issues to work through - particularly trusting Him with her dreams. When everything she has hoped for seems to come crashing down on her, she has to open her heart to what God might have planned for her and believe that He truly does care about her and her dreams. The book is also well written, making it easy to relate to Daisy and enjoyable to read.

While this book is second in the series, you by no means at all need to have read the first book (Perfectly Dateless). In fact, that is one problem I had with this book: if I had to hear about the prom where Daisy does the tango with Max again, I was going to freak out. But I guess that is a lot like a teenager, and I do remember dwelling on things like that when I was a teenager too. So it is fitting to the theme, if annoying.

My other problem is the fact that Daisy's friend's father decides to turn back to Christianity very suddenly. It doesn't seem probable in the real world. While I would like to think it could happen, I'm not that optimistic. Also, the whole plotline involving Jeremy (sorry to be obtuse, I don't want any spoilers) is a bit far-fetched. We have no inkling early on the book that he's so evil and I would like to think that we would. But then again, maybe that is a reflection of Daisy's naviete.

I did take me a bit to really become interested in Perfectly Invisible. However, about halfway through, I was hooked. I couldn't put it down and found myself reading it any chance I could get.

What did I like about this book? I liked that there mean girls (just like in any high school). I also liked how Daisy easily makes you see how she's somewhat of a dork. This has nothing to do with her faith, but she just kind of is one. Finally, I liked that Christian teens that are "in love" with each other can still kiss without the world ending. It seems to be one extreme or another - absolutely no physical affection or "all the way". It was refreshing to see a balance being struck that is more in tune with how the world really is.

I was sent this book in order to provide a review. This did not influence my opinion in any way. All thoughts are 100% my own.

Daisy's back and working on a perfect woman journal. Now, we know she's not going to achieve perfection, but it's certainly fun to watch her try.

Daisy's senior year of high school is filled with one disaster after another. We saw the beginnings of this in Perfectly Dateless. It continues. The harder she tries to keep her life under control, the more interesting it becomes.

I certainly would like to continue on with Daisy's adventures, so here's hoping there will be another book showcasing Daisy and her friend Claire. I can see this book leading into that.

"Perfectly Invisible" is a young adult romance. This is the second book in the series, and I really think you need to read the first book first in order to really understand this one. I didn't, so I was missing some important information. Halfway through, I was surprised to learn that she attended a _Christian_ private school. I kept wondering how she ever became friends with Claire and why Daisy was so loyal to her since Claire treated Daisy pretty badly throughout this whole book.

I also felt like I was missing out on why the various characters acted the way they did. We never really got to know them. Even with Daisy, I didn't realize that she was deeply ashamed of being poor until halfway through, when I also got a few other important clues to her previous behavior.

While the characters were varied, I didn't really like them. Daisy was a hypocrite who was all about appearances. She was good at getting what she wanted while still technically playing within the rules. She's so needy and desperate about the boy that she set herself up to be humiliated. If she couldn't get her dream of success--no matter how unrealistic the expectation--then nothing else was good enough for her. Though we're told she's had some grand revelation at the end that has changed her, I don't actually see that in her behavior.

I will grant that much of the behavior was what you'd see in teens (though more like Freshman behavior than Senior, according to my observations). However, I didn't like how the romance was handled at the end. Daisy and her "true love" hardly spent any time together and were hurtful toward each other. But at the end they were saying how they had a special connection that adults just couldn't understand and Daisy was willing to throw everything away to go running after him (though she claimed she was doing this to "find herself" and not _really_ running after him). That's not what I'd expect in a Christian novel.

Daisy was a Christian, as supposedly were most of the characters. However, the occasional references to God and bits of moralizing felt tagged on. They could have been removed without the story changing. While characters would frequently say, "I'll pray about that," it didn't seem like they expected God to answer, just that saying that was expected of them. Daisy had an annoying habit of saying things like, "I don't hate her. I'm a Christian" when she clearly did "hate" the person. And she apparently thought doing this would make the few non-Christians around her eager to convert.

The story was written in first person, present tense ("I sidle" instead of "she sidled"). There was a very minor amount of explicit bad language and a minor amount of fake bad language. There were no sex scenes or graphic sex talk.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend this to young adults. They're confused enough about love as it is. I know a 14-year-old girl (incoming Freshman) and a 15-year-old girl (Sophomore). Both are really "boy crazy" and romantics. Like Daisy, both are very into appearances and are thinking in terms of what they get out of a relationship.

The younger one, when 13-years-old, got engaged to a boy. Yes, engaged. This boy repeatedly got her into serious trouble at school by hugging her when both knew they'd get in trouble if they did (kind of like what happened to Daisy in the book). Her boyfriend proposed to her right before he moved a far distance away. If she had read this book, I'm sure she would have said (like Daisy) that they had "something special that adults just couldn't understand." And the book would encourage her to follow after her boyfriend all in the name of "finding herself." We were lucky that she met another cute boy shortly afterward who treated her much better than her "fiance." She was very confused by how quickly her feelings changed, and books like this would have made something natural for her age seem like high betrayal of her "true love." Love is confusing enough without introduction unrealistic expectations.